An Amazon driver loads packages into a delivery van at an Amazon delivery station on November 28, 2022 in Alpharetta, Georgia.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Amazon has for years been marching toward making same-day and next-day delivery the standard for members of its Prime loyalty club.
On Monday, the company said it reached a major milestone in those efforts. Amazon said so far this year it’s delivered 1.8 billion units to U.S. Prime members the same or next day, roughly four times what it delivered at those speeds by this point in 2019.
For the past four years, Amazon has poured money and resources into revamping its warehouse and delivery network to shorten shipping times from two days to one day or less. Those efforts hit a snag during the Covid pandemic due to supply chain and labor-market challenges, but normal delivery speeds have largely returned as a result of new warehouses coming online and other improvements to the company’s operations.
Amazon says it achieved its “fastest Prime speeds ever” last quarter.
One of the company’s biggest changes in the past year is a shift away from a national “hub and spoke” fulfillment network, where packages might travel through several facilities across the country, said Udit Madan, Amazon’s vice president of transportation, in an interview. The company moved to a model in which the country is divided into eight smaller regions, with local facilities that stock commonly ordered items.
Fast delivery is notoriously expensive and logistically challenging, and companies typically lose money on deliveries. But Amazon’s change cut costs and boosted delivery speeds, Madan said.
“Our fastest speeds tend to be our most economical,” he said.
Driving fewer miles and requiring fewer handoffs has reduced Amazon’s “cost to serve,” Madan added. Amazon says it’s cut the distance items are traveling from warehouses to customers by 15%, and lowered the number of “touchpoints,” or how many times a package is handled, by 12%.
The company has also seen improvements in its machine-learning technology that allows it to better plan where and how much inventory is placed in warehouses, hastening delivery times. Across the top 60 U.S. metro areas, Amazon says more than half of Prime orders arrived the same or next day.
Speedier delivery has pushed shoppers to purchase more items from Amazon than they might normally buy from their local corner store, or big-box retailers like Best Buy.
“We’ve consistently seen that as we’re offering faster speeds, we’re actually expanding the consideration set that customers think of us for when they’re thinking about their purchases,” Madan said. “What we’re seeing is greater engagement and more purchases from customers.”
Amazon is rolling out more so-called “same-day sites,” or smaller buildings located closer to large metro areas where the company fulfills, sorts and delivers products from a single location. It has traditionally operated distinct facilities for these purposes, meaning separate fulfillment centers, sort centers and delivery stations.
Same-day sites are stocked with a rotating selection of millions of items tailored to what customers are purchasing in the area, whereas a typical warehouse is much larger and may have a more random assortment of products.
Amazon plans to double the number of same-day sites in its network over the next two years, Madan said.
The company declined to share how many same-day sites it maintains. The Wall Street Journal reported Amazon has opened approximately 45 facilities since 2019, citing data from MWPVL International, a supply chain and logistics consulting firm that closely tracks Amazon’s distribution network.
Apple announces a new design language for its operating systems called “Liquid Glass” during the annual Apple “Worldwide Developers Conference” (WWDC) at Apple Park, the corporate headquarters of Apple Inc., in Cupertino, California on June 9, 2025.
Josh Edelson | AFP | Getty Images
Apple released the public beta preview version of its next iPhone operating system, called iOS 26.
This software release on Thursday means that members of the public with recent iPhones can preview how the device’s interface will change in the fall when the software is formally released and pushed to users.
To try out iOS 26, iPhone users in the U.S. and other countries need to enroll on Apple’s website, then they can navigate to the settings menu, select General, then Software Updates and then Beta Updates.
This version of the Apple mobile operating system is one of the biggest changes to the iPhone’s user interface design since 2013, when Apple’s iOS 7 introduced a new, flatter look.
This year’s redesign is called “Liquid Glass,” and it replaces many of the iPhone’s familiar buttons and menus with versions that are translucent and show animationswhile the user navigates their apps. The buttons are supposed to mimic the look of glass that flows like liquid. Apple relies on public feedback of its betas to tweak and change some of the most radical interfaces it tries out.
Apple has also updated its operating systems for iPads, Mac computers, and Apple Watch to use the new user interface.
Besides the new look, Apple updated the Phone app to combine recent calls and voicemails into one screen. The company has also added more screening tools into the iPhone’s software to filter out spam calls and texts.
Noticeably missing from iOS 26, however, are the major updates to Siriartificial intelligence voice assistant that Apple promised back in 2024. Those features are not expected to arrive anytime before 2026.
Apple, though, has added several clever new features that use AI, including real-time translations inside iMessage and FaceTime, and the ability to visually search using the information inside a screenshot — for example, a user could highlight a lamp inside a screenshot of a news article to find where to buy a similar lamp to one seen online.
The company releases one major software update per year for its iPhones and other devices. They are announced in June, at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference, and software makers start tinkering with it then. Over the summer, Apple releases a public beta version for early adopters who want to help fix bugs and preview the new features.
Then, alongside new iPhone hardware in the fall, Apple pushes the new software to users, and most people’s phones automatically update to the new iOS.
Elon Musk receives a golden key from U.S. President Donald Trump in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 30, 2025. REUTERS/Nathan Howard
Nathan Howard | Reuters
President Donald Trump on Thursday denied claims that he wants to wreck Elon Musk‘s companies and their work with the U.S. government.
“Everyone is stating that I will destroy Elon’s companies by taking away some, if not all, of the large scale subsidies he receives from the U.S. Government,” he said in a post to Truth Social. “This is not so! I want Elon, and all businesses within our Country, to THRIVE, in fact, THRIVE like never before!”
“The better they do, the better the USA does, and that’s good for all of us,” Trump wrote.
Trump’s response comes as the pair have continued a war of words that began with Musk’s opposition to the president’s signature spending bill, and evolved into the Tesla CEO attacking the president’s relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
In June, the president threatened to cut some of Musk’s government contracts as the two clashed over the “Big Beautiful Bill” and their relationship unraveled.
On Wednesday, the tech CEO said on a second-quarter earnings call that Tesla could experience a “few rough quarters” due to tariff costs and the expiration of federal electric vehicle benefits at the end of September.
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Earlier in the day, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt suggested that the administration doesn’t want federal agencies to work with Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI.
Her remarks come after the Pentagon announced July 14 that it had awarded xAI and three other AI companies contracts worth up to $200 million each.
Musk’s aerospace and defense contractor SpaceX also has massive contract exposure in the US.
The re-usable rocket maker has received over $22 billion from work with the federal government since 2008, according to FedScout, which does federal spending and government contract research. That includes contracts from NASA, the U.S. Air Force and Space Force, among others, but does not reflect contract revenue from confidential initiatives.
The Trump administration recently reviewed SpaceX federal contracts to see if there was potential for cuts, according to the Wall Street Journal. The review found most were critical.
Musk’s automaker, Tesla, has reported $12.24 billion in sales of “automotive regulatory credits,” or environmental credits, since 2015, according to an evaluation of the EV maker’s financial filings by FedScout CEO Geoff Orazem and CNBC.
This included $439 million in regulatory credit sales during the second quarter of 2025.
Such incentives were largely derived from federal and state regulations in the U.S. that require automakers to sell some number of low-emission vehicles or buy credits from companies like Tesla, which often have an excess.
Regulatory credit sales go straight to Tesla’s bottom line.
In its quarterly financial filing on Thursday, Tesla mentioned the Trump-backed “One Big Beautiful Act” by name in its Risk Factors.
“The loss of previously available tax credits and carbon offset mechanisms may further negatively impact our financial results,” Tesla’s filing said.
The company added that “provisions of the OBBBA could affect battery cell expenses and impact costs for our consumers, negatively impacting demand.”
Packages ride on a conveyor belt during Cyber Monday at an Amazon fulfillment center on December 2, 2024 in Orlando, Florida.
Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo | Getty Images
Amazon is turning to the startup world to find a potential fix for one of its thorniest logistics problems.
Retailers of all sizes have in recent years struggled with an uptick in fraudulent returns. The scam involves shoppers requesting a refund, but instead of returning the merchandise, they keep the item and send back an empty package or a box of unrelated junk.
It’s become a costly nuisance for retailers, accounting for $103 billion in losses last year, according to Appriss Retail.
Cambridge Terahertz, a Sunnyvale, California-based startup, has developed a 3D imaging system that can see inside unopened packages, enabling retailers to more easily and quickly spot cases of return fraud.
The company has just closed a $12 million seed financing, led by venture firm Felicis, with participation from Amazon’s $1 billion Industrial Innovation Fund and other investors.
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“Amazon handles a lot of boxes, as you can imagine,” Nathan Monroe, CEO of Cambridge Terahertz, said in an interview. “It’s a big problem just knowing what’s inside boxes, knowing how efficiently they’re packed, knowing if what you’ve returned to them is what you said it is.”
Amazon launched the Industrial Innovation Fund in 2022 with a goal of investing in businesses working on technology solutions that could apply to the company’s massive and complex operations network, from the middle mile to the last-mile portion of the delivery process.
Franziska Bossart, head of the fund, said in an interview that Amazon will typically plan to pursue a deeper “commercial relationship” with portfolio companies over time, ranging from piloting the technology to a potential acquisition.
Cambridge’s technology “aligns well with Amazon’s needs” and can have a real impact on its ability to screen inventory for damages and defects once it’s returned or before a package leaves the warehouse.
“The ability to see into boxes, identify contents, along with the compact nature of the system could allow for integration at various points in our operations,” Bossart said.
The fund has backed 20 companies so far. It also sourced Amazon’s acquihire and licensing deal with artificial intelligence robotics startup Covariant last August, Bossart added.
Amazon’s investment track record has come under scrutiny in the past. A 2020 investigation from The Wall Street Journal found the company’s Alexa Fund, which primarily invests in voice and AI technologies, used privileged information gained during meetings to launch its own competing products, citing people and startups familiar with the situation. Amazon previously denied any wrongdoing.
One of the Alexa Fund’s most notable investments was in video doorbell maker Ring, which Amazon later acquired in 2018 for $1 billion.
Cambridge connected with Amazon last year through a pitch competition focused on packaging visibility. Monroe co-founded the company in 2023 after researching terahertz imaging at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The company, which has 10 employees, says it shrunk airport-scale security scanners down to a chip-based system inside a pyramid-shaped device that can fit in your hand. The device was originally conceived as a way to detect concealed weapons by seeing through nonconducive materials, like clothing or packages, in an unobtrusive way.
Cambridge cofounders Nathan Monroe and Anand Dixit hold a custom chip and pyramid-shaped device that make up its 3D imaging system.
Cambridge Terahertz
Cambridge said it has since been approached by companies interested in how the technology can be used in supply chains, manufacturing, aerospace and medical applications.
The startup said it has secured four government contracts, and has had discussions with U.S. Customs and Border Protection around how the technology can be used to detect shipments of fentanyl at the border, a problem the Trump administration has zeroed in on through its crackdown on a near century-old trade loophole known as de minimis.
The capital from Amazon and others will enable Cambridge to ramp up hiring and “fully productize” its 3D imaging technology, Monroe said.